Imagine hiring a business process outsourcing company, a BPO, to handle your customer-service inquiries. They have a team of people ready to start. You give them access to the inquiries and say, “Go.”
You haven’t explained your business, who your customers are, or what problems they tend to have. You haven’t shared any scripts or told the team what they can resolve themselves. Presumably they’ll work it out. They’re customer-service people.
An inquiry arrives about a shipment with missing documentation. In one business, that might be a minor inconvenience for accounting. In another, the entire shipment can’t be used until the documentation arrives. The person reading the inquiry has no way of knowing which business you’ve handed them.
They could offer some generic advice, gather more information, or escalate the inquiry to you. Then do the same with the next one. You could end up paying a team of people to organise your inquiries into a list of things you still need to answer.
How well the arrangement works would depend on the individuals trying to make sense of it, using whatever they’d learned from other companies. Almost certainly, it wouldn’t be what you had in mind.
I think this is a useful exercise before giving a project to an AI agent: imagine handing the work to an outsourced team of people. Think through what they’d need to know and how you’d assess what they did. You can use that preparation even if you’ve never managed an outsourced team.
A good BPO would insist on preparing the handover
In practice, a good provider would want to go through an onboarding process before taking over your customer service. An engagement manager would ask about the project, the resources required, how the work is handled today and what’s going to change.
They’d have meetings with your team, interview the people doing the work and read your process documents. They’d work out what experience their staff need, what training to provide, and how to move from planning through testing to the full engagement.
For the inquiries themselves, they’d need scripts for different circumstances, rules about what counts as serious, and instructions for when and how to escalate. You’d agree on reporting and how the work would be audited, so you could see whether customers were getting the help they needed.
The BPO wants this preparation too. Every time someone has to raise their hand and say, “I don’t know what to do,” a manager has to get involved. If the manager doesn’t know either, the question comes back to your company. Removing confusion before the work starts saves both sides time dealing with it later.
Give your agent the same preparation
With your own agent, you can skip that entire process. You can hand over whatever work you want, immediately. Some of us haven’t had the experience of planning an outsourcing engagement, and assigning a task to an agent feels cheap and low risk. It’s easy to try it and then say, “Wow, it all went wrong.”
Before you start, imagine the work going to that team of people. What instructions would you create? How would you break the project into chunks they could carry out? What would you want to see as they progressed, and how would you judge the results?
The same exercise works for a design project or software development. You’d think through the assignment before giving it to an outsourced team, including what they should come back to you about. An agent needs that consideration too.
Instructions don’t guarantee that people will follow them, and they don’t guarantee that an agent will either. In both cases, they give you a better chance of getting what you wanted. You still need to observe the work and check the results.
Work through the requirements with the agent
You don’t have to figure out all of this on your own. Ask the agent to help plan the assignment, identify what’s missing and ask you questions before starting. The preparation needs to happen one way or another.
For a small task, think through:
- What context does the agent need?
- What instructions should it follow?
- What are the guardrails, including when it should stop and ask you?
- What’s out of scope?
- What results or feedback should it report so you can measure progress and assess whether the work is good enough?
You might go through those questions and decide the agent already has everything it needs. Fine, assign the work. Every task doesn’t need a training programme, a rollout plan and an audit process.
For example, you could start by giving the agent a batch of customer-service inquiries and asking it to propose how to handle each one. Give it your process documents and make clear that it mustn’t send any replies yet. You want to review its proposed responses and escalation decisions before giving it authority to act.
That review is an initial testing step. The aim is to establish whether you can give the agent more responsibility, rather than leave yourself permanently checking a list of inquiries it hasn’t resolved. A report saying “reviewed 30 inquiries” tells you how much work it got through. Checking whether the proposed responses are appropriate, and whether it recognised the inquiries that needed escalation, helps you decide what it’s ready to take on.
For a larger assignment, you may need to spend more time working through the answers, provide existing process documents, or test how the agent handles different situations before handing over the whole job. You’d want to check that an agent handling customer inquiries knows what to do about that missing shipment documentation before it starts advising customers.
Practise on the small assignments
Start doing this with work that’s easy to check. Get used to considering what the agent needs to know, what decisions it can make and what you expect back. Let the agent help you work through the questions.
Eventually you’ll want to give agents a much bigger project, where getting the scope, instructions or escalation rules wrong has more serious consequences. If you’ve been practising with smaller assignments, you’ll already have experience preparing the work and checking how it turns out. You can spend your attention on the requirements of the bigger project instead of learning the whole process for the first time.